Zal K. Shroff (he/him) is an Assistant Professor at CUNY School of Law. He is a civil rights lawyer and has been a lead attorney in more than two dozen impact cases across the United States spanning police and prosecutorial accountability, voting rights, First Amendment protest/political speech, race and religious discrimination, conditions of confinement, and poverty discrimination. Zal’s work focuses on campaign litigation—designing complex federal and state court challenges to vindicate civil rights while advancing specific legislative and grassroots advocacy campaigns. His work has included cases and amici curiae briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court, Fifth Circuit, Ninth Circuit, Tenth Circuit, and the appellate courts of California, Kansas, and New York. At CUNY, Zal teaches federal civil rights litigation in the Equality & Justice Clinic.
Before he came to CUNY, Zal served as the Acting Legal Director and as a Senior Attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. Zal litigated impact cases, spearheaded local and statewide advocacy campaigns, and supervised a program staff of lawyers and advocates working on economic and racial justice. Zal’s significant impact litigation victories included: Debt Collective v. Judicial Council of California, a case against the California courts for running a fines and fees scheme that extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from low-income Californians; and Coalition on Homelessness v. San Francisco, a case that made it illegal for California cities to tow and sell people’s vehicles just because they cannot afford to pay their parking tickets.
Zal was formerly a Clinical Lecturer at Yale Law School, where he worked with students on litigation and advocacy projects that addressed conditions of confinement and voting rights for incarcerated individuals. He first cut his teeth on litigation at the ACLU of Kansas, where he served as a staff attorney for two years and worked on several proactive, organizer-led social justice campaigns. Litigation credits included: Loud Light v. Schwab, an action that forced the Kansas Secretary of State to disclose information about 30,000 voters needlessly disenfranchised by state election procedures; and Cole v. Goossen, emergency litigation on behalf of student protestors resulting in major reform to protest policies at the Kansas Capitol.
Zal began his career as the Clifford Chance Foundation Fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice, serving as an advisor on in-house corporate governance matters and developing expertise on state-level funding for college in prison programs. He graduated from Brown University and received his J.D. at Columbia Law School, where he and his clinic partners took a lead role in excessive force and parole release cases for incarcerated individuals in New York’s state and federal prisons.
